“Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker this month moved to suspend data center tax incentives after lawmakers in his state failed to do so.”
Exactly. Why are taxpayers subsidizing data centers? Filthy rich tech companies should pay for their own infrastructure.
And how many of these data centers have already been built? And where? And under what conditions?
There seems to be a lot of secrecy as to how these centers will affect their local communities in terms of rising energy costs, possible water pollution, and only a handful of new jobs created.
We need far more transparency and community input into these structures than we are getting right now.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said. Gov. Hochul has protected us New Yorkers from the predatory greed of the AI industry. They want to ram these monstrosities down our throats before all the truth can be known about the impact on our communities and our future well-being. Here in NY, this has become a partisan issue with the Repubs baring their fangs to attack the Governor's rational decision. They don't seem to care to listen to our concerns either here in NY or in DC. We need to have more politicians like Govs Hochul and Pritzker who have the foresight to consider all the facts before making a decision that will benefit all of us.
Why would "filthy rich oligarchs" expend their money when state and local governments will subsidize data center construction? Even better, the governments reduce the risk and the filthy rich pocket the dividends! What's not to like in this system?
Exactly. It's time that citizens ensure that their local officials are representing their needs. If data centers are going to produce positive effects, let's hear what those are and weigh them against the drawbacks. At the very least, we need transparency to inform our decisions about whom to vote for in the next election.
Living in Northern Virginia, the largest concentration of data centers in the planet, I see first hand what a blight data centers are on the suburban landscape and our natural environment. Given that data center developers knew from the start that they had to lie to residents about what they were doing and buy off politicians and homeowners tells you that they knew from the start that this development would be opposed. Now they are talking about putting installations in space, out of our reach, although you can find an article in the NYT today about all the space junk falling out of the sky and how it can be difficult to obtain accountability from the people who put this stuff up there. The issue of tech lords and other oligarchs thinking they can do whatever they want -- the faster they move the more they can get away with breaking -- is a bigger issue than data centers or AI. We need government that represents ordinary people, not the monied interests.
We need a paradigm shift here. We need, on a national level, to make it clear that grotesque Megacorp profits can no longer be unwillingly extracted from ordinary peoples' lives and pocket books. Mandate that they be self powered and off the Grid. Mandate that they use other technologies to mitigate the enormous amounts of waste heat they produce. These things really do create 'Heat Islands many miles across which will have huge local environmental impacts. And finally they need to have mandates to slash their egregious noise output.
I also live in Northern Virginia and the data centers truly are a blight. Loudoun County has over 60, which are estimated to carry 70% of global web traffic, according to Wikipedia. In addition to the massive amounts of power and water they use, it seems to me that there’s a security risk to have so many data centers clustered together.
That last sentence, "We need government that represents ordinary people, not the monied interests." says it for more than data centers. Legislation by lobbyists and corporate interests is destructive to democracy. No one vote or voting influence should have more weight than any other. While at it, remove the big money influence. Pay-to-play should be illegal.
A proposed data center in Southern Ohio is projected to require 10 gigawatts of power. Typical natural gas power plants produce 100-400 megawatts, and typical nuclear power plants produce 1 gigawatt of power. At $2.2 million per megawatt for natural gas plants, that's $2.2 billion. But guess what? The owners of that Ohio data center won't be paying for the additional generating capacity. The existing Ohio rate payers will. That's call externalizing a cost of doing business, just like a business does when it pollutes and doesn't clean up after itself. So the Ohio rate payers will have higher electricity rates, and the benefits go to the owners of the data center. Does that seem fair?
The people who build data centers should also be charged for the capital costs of increasing electric generating capacity.
Data centers take up entirely too much green space, too much water and too much energy. I agree that there should be restrictions on them and they shouldn’t be allowed to make their own rules. In my state there’s a fight in more than one neighborhood to keep them out especially by an animal shelter and a school. Who wants their kids growing up around that.
A national moratorium would be most efficient, but even if there is a Blue Wave in November, tRump will never sign such a thing. So State by State it must be. While Chip technology continues to leap forward, old problems persist - they use incredible amounts of power - converting much of it into waste heat. We have traditionally used increasingly dear groundwater to cool server farms, but in a world of (Unacknowledged) Climate Change we do not have the option of using precious ground water needed by human beings to cool these behemoths.
Here in Northern Indiana (specifically St. Joseph County (county seat: South Bend)) we, the people of all political stripes, right and left, defeated an effort to build one of these energy-gobbling, environment-destroying hyperscale data center monsters late last year. While the research in the following piece, "Fighting a “Hyper-scale” Data Center Campus in the Hinterlands Produces a Win," https://jcaverleyhamilton.substack.com/p/fighting-a-hyper-scale-data-center, may be aging, it may yet give any of you facing one of these "developments" some ideas in your own struggles. We will never be serfs in a techno-feudalism that the multi-billionaire oligarchy wishes to impose on us. We must crush them before they crush us.
There needs to be a nationwide ban on the use of NDAs to silence zoning boards from public hearings on zoning modifications and construction permitting. The tech bros can afford a legion of thousands of legal teams to attack county zoning boards across the entire country everywhere all at the same time. Nothing short of a national response can counter that raw power.
Data centers need to provide a net positive gain for the local communities nearby.
1. They should provide their own non-carbon-based power and provide excess power to the local grid as well as a source of buffering for demand spikes.
2. They should provide a solid tax base for local infrastructure.
3. They should use closed loop cooling to avoid impact to the local water supply.
4. They should use silent or nearly silent cooling fans with sound directed mostly upward.
5. They should be surrounded by sound absorbing landscaping.
6. They should provide well-paying jobs for those who work there, not minimum wage jobs.
Another issue with data centers that no one talks about much is where’s the labor going to come from to build them. It takes electricians, pipefitters, HVAC, welders and others to build and maintain the massive infrastructure it takes. Unfortunately we don’t have enough skilled craftsmen to build and maintain them.
Let’s hear it for my Gov. JB Pritzker and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for lining up with Kathy Hochul for standing up to data centers.
As you point out, we Democratic voters are not bowing down to the new centers, which if unregulated, will be as prominent as our neighborhood McDonalds.
But instead of Big Macs (hold the cheese), we’ll have to deal not only with these huge buildings that store digital information as handily as McD’s crew members, but the AI oligarchs’ chutzpah.
Just because this gangs are gazillionaires, they don’t have our permission to assault our neighborhoods with their peacock power.
We were here first. Residents, not rich boys, who are competing as if in a fraternity beer pong or flip cup.
Now we need more leaders, more populations, more people who care about the health of our communities to join with the trio mentioned above and tell these brazen developers that “not so fast. Our quality of life surpasses your intent. Step back.”
Let this issue be the door through which we the people burst to oppose billionaire tax cuts, corporate greed, corruption — all the way to Citizens United.
I'm going to take another opportunity to beat a drum for an idea that others may not like, and may possibly be specious, anyway. That idea is that AI is not a product at all, and folks trying to treat it as such are on a fool's errand. This has happened before and provides a similar template.
Way back in the latter quarter of the 20th century, there was this thing that spontaneously grew out of practically nothing. It started out with just a bunch of scientists wanting a simple and fast way of communicating with each other about their research projects.
The great enabler of scientific progress has always been communication between researchers. For example, Newton's original work on gravitation and dynamics grew out of a correspondence between himself and Robert Hooke. The late 20th-century high-energy physicists wanted to supercharge their research collaborations by connecting their computers so they could message each other via something called electronic mail, or "email." That interconnection became the Internet, and eventually the World Wide Web. That's why Internet URLs traditionally begin with "www."
The Internet is part of the infrastructure we use to generate and disseminate knowledge. It is not a "product," but a public good that is owned and operated collectively as part of the plural (non-profit) sector of modern society. Nobody owns the thing. Folks can and do use it to run businesses that manufacture goods and services for profit, but it is not a profit center itself.
Like the Internet, artificial intelligence is not a product. It is a means of more efficiently (and maybe even more effectively) developing and disseminating knowledge. That is a public good. As such, it belongs in the plural (non-profit) sector. Trying to shoehorn it into a for-profit business model is like trying to get orange juice out of an apple. It ain't a-gonna work! The Chinese have already shown that AI can be done as well, but cheaper using an open-source (i.e., essentially not-for-profit) approach. Throwing tons of money and computing resources into for-profit AI development is just plain dumb.
“Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker this month moved to suspend data center tax incentives after lawmakers in his state failed to do so.”
Exactly. Why are taxpayers subsidizing data centers? Filthy rich tech companies should pay for their own infrastructure.
And how many of these data centers have already been built? And where? And under what conditions?
There seems to be a lot of secrecy as to how these centers will affect their local communities in terms of rising energy costs, possible water pollution, and only a handful of new jobs created.
We need far more transparency and community input into these structures than we are getting right now.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said. Gov. Hochul has protected us New Yorkers from the predatory greed of the AI industry. They want to ram these monstrosities down our throats before all the truth can be known about the impact on our communities and our future well-being. Here in NY, this has become a partisan issue with the Repubs baring their fangs to attack the Governor's rational decision. They don't seem to care to listen to our concerns either here in NY or in DC. We need to have more politicians like Govs Hochul and Pritzker who have the foresight to consider all the facts before making a decision that will benefit all of us.
Why would "filthy rich oligarchs" expend their money when state and local governments will subsidize data center construction? Even better, the governments reduce the risk and the filthy rich pocket the dividends! What's not to like in this system?
Exactly. It's time that citizens ensure that their local officials are representing their needs. If data centers are going to produce positive effects, let's hear what those are and weigh them against the drawbacks. At the very least, we need transparency to inform our decisions about whom to vote for in the next election.
Living in Northern Virginia, the largest concentration of data centers in the planet, I see first hand what a blight data centers are on the suburban landscape and our natural environment. Given that data center developers knew from the start that they had to lie to residents about what they were doing and buy off politicians and homeowners tells you that they knew from the start that this development would be opposed. Now they are talking about putting installations in space, out of our reach, although you can find an article in the NYT today about all the space junk falling out of the sky and how it can be difficult to obtain accountability from the people who put this stuff up there. The issue of tech lords and other oligarchs thinking they can do whatever they want -- the faster they move the more they can get away with breaking -- is a bigger issue than data centers or AI. We need government that represents ordinary people, not the monied interests.
We need a paradigm shift here. We need, on a national level, to make it clear that grotesque Megacorp profits can no longer be unwillingly extracted from ordinary peoples' lives and pocket books. Mandate that they be self powered and off the Grid. Mandate that they use other technologies to mitigate the enormous amounts of waste heat they produce. These things really do create 'Heat Islands many miles across which will have huge local environmental impacts. And finally they need to have mandates to slash their egregious noise output.
I also live in Northern Virginia and the data centers truly are a blight. Loudoun County has over 60, which are estimated to carry 70% of global web traffic, according to Wikipedia. In addition to the massive amounts of power and water they use, it seems to me that there’s a security risk to have so many data centers clustered together.
That last sentence, "We need government that represents ordinary people, not the monied interests." says it for more than data centers. Legislation by lobbyists and corporate interests is destructive to democracy. No one vote or voting influence should have more weight than any other. While at it, remove the big money influence. Pay-to-play should be illegal.
A proposed data center in Southern Ohio is projected to require 10 gigawatts of power. Typical natural gas power plants produce 100-400 megawatts, and typical nuclear power plants produce 1 gigawatt of power. At $2.2 million per megawatt for natural gas plants, that's $2.2 billion. But guess what? The owners of that Ohio data center won't be paying for the additional generating capacity. The existing Ohio rate payers will. That's call externalizing a cost of doing business, just like a business does when it pollutes and doesn't clean up after itself. So the Ohio rate payers will have higher electricity rates, and the benefits go to the owners of the data center. Does that seem fair?
The people who build data centers should also be charged for the capital costs of increasing electric generating capacity.
Finally, some spines are being sprouted.
The data center and AI boom is Predator Capitalism. It is the pursuit of profit without conscience or the principle of basic human decency.
Hear hear! You couldn't have said it better.
Data centers take up entirely too much green space, too much water and too much energy. I agree that there should be restrictions on them and they shouldn’t be allowed to make their own rules. In my state there’s a fight in more than one neighborhood to keep them out especially by an animal shelter and a school. Who wants their kids growing up around that.
People still come first to most of us!
Not to the people with insatiable greed.
Count Maura Healey among the governors standing up to AI oligarchs.
A national moratorium would be most efficient, but even if there is a Blue Wave in November, tRump will never sign such a thing. So State by State it must be. While Chip technology continues to leap forward, old problems persist - they use incredible amounts of power - converting much of it into waste heat. We have traditionally used increasingly dear groundwater to cool server farms, but in a world of (Unacknowledged) Climate Change we do not have the option of using precious ground water needed by human beings to cool these behemoths.
Here in Northern Indiana (specifically St. Joseph County (county seat: South Bend)) we, the people of all political stripes, right and left, defeated an effort to build one of these energy-gobbling, environment-destroying hyperscale data center monsters late last year. While the research in the following piece, "Fighting a “Hyper-scale” Data Center Campus in the Hinterlands Produces a Win," https://jcaverleyhamilton.substack.com/p/fighting-a-hyper-scale-data-center, may be aging, it may yet give any of you facing one of these "developments" some ideas in your own struggles. We will never be serfs in a techno-feudalism that the multi-billionaire oligarchy wishes to impose on us. We must crush them before they crush us.
Bravo, John! Congrats to you all.
Five mornings a week, week after week, Jen gives me hope.
There needs to be a nationwide ban on the use of NDAs to silence zoning boards from public hearings on zoning modifications and construction permitting. The tech bros can afford a legion of thousands of legal teams to attack county zoning boards across the entire country everywhere all at the same time. Nothing short of a national response can counter that raw power.
Data centers need to provide a net positive gain for the local communities nearby.
1. They should provide their own non-carbon-based power and provide excess power to the local grid as well as a source of buffering for demand spikes.
2. They should provide a solid tax base for local infrastructure.
3. They should use closed loop cooling to avoid impact to the local water supply.
4. They should use silent or nearly silent cooling fans with sound directed mostly upward.
5. They should be surrounded by sound absorbing landscaping.
6. They should provide well-paying jobs for those who work there, not minimum wage jobs.
Another issue with data centers that no one talks about much is where’s the labor going to come from to build them. It takes electricians, pipefitters, HVAC, welders and others to build and maintain the massive infrastructure it takes. Unfortunately we don’t have enough skilled craftsmen to build and maintain them.
Let’s hear it for my Gov. JB Pritzker and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for lining up with Kathy Hochul for standing up to data centers.
As you point out, we Democratic voters are not bowing down to the new centers, which if unregulated, will be as prominent as our neighborhood McDonalds.
But instead of Big Macs (hold the cheese), we’ll have to deal not only with these huge buildings that store digital information as handily as McD’s crew members, but the AI oligarchs’ chutzpah.
Just because this gangs are gazillionaires, they don’t have our permission to assault our neighborhoods with their peacock power.
We were here first. Residents, not rich boys, who are competing as if in a fraternity beer pong or flip cup.
Now we need more leaders, more populations, more people who care about the health of our communities to join with the trio mentioned above and tell these brazen developers that “not so fast. Our quality of life surpasses your intent. Step back.”
Let this issue be the door through which we the people burst to oppose billionaire tax cuts, corporate greed, corruption — all the way to Citizens United.
I'm going to take another opportunity to beat a drum for an idea that others may not like, and may possibly be specious, anyway. That idea is that AI is not a product at all, and folks trying to treat it as such are on a fool's errand. This has happened before and provides a similar template.
Way back in the latter quarter of the 20th century, there was this thing that spontaneously grew out of practically nothing. It started out with just a bunch of scientists wanting a simple and fast way of communicating with each other about their research projects.
The great enabler of scientific progress has always been communication between researchers. For example, Newton's original work on gravitation and dynamics grew out of a correspondence between himself and Robert Hooke. The late 20th-century high-energy physicists wanted to supercharge their research collaborations by connecting their computers so they could message each other via something called electronic mail, or "email." That interconnection became the Internet, and eventually the World Wide Web. That's why Internet URLs traditionally begin with "www."
The Internet is part of the infrastructure we use to generate and disseminate knowledge. It is not a "product," but a public good that is owned and operated collectively as part of the plural (non-profit) sector of modern society. Nobody owns the thing. Folks can and do use it to run businesses that manufacture goods and services for profit, but it is not a profit center itself.
Like the Internet, artificial intelligence is not a product. It is a means of more efficiently (and maybe even more effectively) developing and disseminating knowledge. That is a public good. As such, it belongs in the plural (non-profit) sector. Trying to shoehorn it into a for-profit business model is like trying to get orange juice out of an apple. It ain't a-gonna work! The Chinese have already shown that AI can be done as well, but cheaper using an open-source (i.e., essentially not-for-profit) approach. Throwing tons of money and computing resources into for-profit AI development is just plain dumb.